Using Your Intellect to Open Your Heart

If you have a strong intellect and a lot of courage, but you have a weak social life, you can leverage your courage, intellect, and overall personal power to become a more loving, caring person.

In an accurate intellectual understanding of the world, it makes sense to cooperate with and provide value to other people. As such, the path of the mind and the path of the heart ultimately are one, if only you know how to use them properly.

True power is about empowering others-- not overpowering them. If you have some social timidity, tend to isolate yourself, or get overly-concerned about others' opinions of you, make uplifting others your focus. Do this in both your work and in your interactions with people. If you are pure in intent, you have no reason for worry about what other people may think of you. Don't just be a doormat or a passive angel here, though. Make use of that power, courage, and intellect of yours.

Truth and Power vs. Love

In terms of Steve Pavlina's Truth, Love, and Power model of personal growth, this video is targeted at people who are strongly aligned with Truth and Power but have a weak alignment with Love. This means that you have a robust intellect and are good at consistently taking action and overcoming fear, but you spend most of your time alone or emotionally distant from other people.

The Love-Guided Evolution

There is a clear evolution people on this path take, and that evolution is guided by your increasing alignment with love. The evolution goes as follows:

If you have a strong alignment with Truth and Power, but close to no alignment with Love, you are probably some kind of organized criminal or unethical businessman. Once you gain enough Love to drop the psychopath's mindset, you become benign, and are either a social outcast or generally "off the radar." In this period of time you'll probably want to lay low while you re-evaluate your life.

Once you're out of that period, you probably become a relatively normal member of society for a little while . While you're spending most of your time being normal, you're bound to steadily start pursuing your own personal projects and interests on the side. You steadily pursue those activities more and more until they become full-time pursuits for you-- perhaps you even try to make a living out of them. This is likely, because your strong alignment with truth and power will make it difficult for you to hold down a normal job for long. At that point you become an unknown or starving (i.e. broke) artist.

The step beyond starving artist, as you might guess, is to be an appreciated, successful artist or businessman. Beyond this, the final step is to be an effective lightworker. This means that you are not only externally successful in your creative/business endeavors, but your work also makes a tangible positive difference in the world. You won't get to this point by selling sodas to people, though you also won't get here by isolating yourself and working in a vacuum-- even if you are very well-intended in the work that you do.

My Story

I talk about this particular path because I am on it, too. The only difference for me was that my low point did not involve crime, but rather heavy internal conflict. I've discussed that period of my life in this article. At my lowest point I regarded people as biological machines without consciousness. This made alignment with love very difficult- I talked to people very little- and I was ridiculously distressed.

Once I decided to consider that there is some intelligence to living beings (including myself), I calmed down and felt better, but I was reluctant to do anything much with my life. I focused on self-reflection. Here I became the "benign social outcast." This was between my junior and senior year of high school.

Then, for my senior year, I basically lived as a normal person. I studied personal development when I had the time to, and I occasionally went on 2-3 hour runs, but most of my time was devoted to going to school and being normal.

Next, in my first semester of college, I started this website, but it was months before I talked to anyone about it much at all. Thus, I entered the "unknown artist" phase. "Starving" was not added to "unknown" until after my first year of college ended. I have been in this phase for 2 and a half years now, with the "starving" aspect coming and going in varying degrees.

I know that to reach those subsequent phases of evolution, I have to increase my alignment with love. The basic solution that I see at this point is to involve other people in my work more. I intend to achieve that through Envisioning the Future (and Inviting Input).